Ron Shultz, PhD
Associate Professor of Education
草莓社区

Across the country, bilingual teachers are in short supply. This has direct implications for Dual Language programs. Professional literature also suggests that equally problematic to the recruitment of DL teachers is their retention. Multiple factors can influence a teacher鈥檚 choice to leave the DL classroom, or perhaps even the teaching profession. However, if we are to reverse this trend, greater understanding of these dynamics and an intentional effort to address the related challenges and concerns must be considered. This presentation focuses on efforts to better understand the needs and experiences of teachers in a particular DL program, while also creating opportunities for increased support, with the ultimate goal of increasing teachers鈥� sense of competence and longevity in their role.

Dr. Ron Shultz is an Associate Professor of Teacher Education and the Coordinator for the PK-6 Elementary Education Program at EMU. He also serves as the Field Placement Coordinator for the department. He earned a B.S. degree in Liberal Arts studies from 草莓社区 with a PK-8 teaching certification, an M.A. in Education from Millersville University, and a Ph.D. George Mason University with a focus on teacher education and multicultural/multilingual education. Ron has been teaching in the Education Department at EMU since the fall of 2011. In addition to preparing future elementary teachers, Ron’s research interests include bilingual education and culturally responsive teaching.

Theology and Ethics After Nature

Peter Dula
Professor of Religion and Culture
草莓社区

Can nature tell us anything about morality? Can humans draw conclusions about how to live with each other and the land from observations about ecology? In recent years, scholars across disciplines have argued not just that we can but that we must in order to adequately reckon with the climate crisis. Jedediah Purdy, a prominent theorist of democracy and environmental law, argues that this is a mistake. Moreover, he thinks it is a mistake that can be blamed on religion. In this colloquium I will try to say why I think he is right about the former but wrong about the latter.

Peter Dula is Professor of Religion and Culture at 草莓社区. He received a Ph.D from Duke University in theology and ethics in 2004. He is the author of Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (Oxford, 2011) and co-editor (with David Evans) of Between the World of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christianity (Cascade, 2018). Before coming to EMU, he worked with the Mennonite Central Committee in Iraq and Burundi and taught at the Meserete Kristos College Ethiopia where he was a Fulbright scholar. His most recent work is in the areas of eco-theology and philosophy.

Ruralism and Resistance: Environmental Concern Among Mennonites in the U.S.

Jennifer Holsinger, Associate Professor of Sociology at 草莓社区

The case of Mennonites offers an opportunity to examine the intersection between rurality, religion and environmental perspectives. Drawing from her sabbatical project, Jenni will apply a framework of religious environmental movements to data from a national survey of Mennonites. She will explore the roles of individual and place characteristics on the predominant environmental discourses of a religious group that is often overlooked in the sociological literature.  

Jenni Holsinger is Associate Professor of Sociology at 草莓社区. She completed her graduate studies at the University of Washington and her undergraduate degree at Seattle Pacific University. Her research interests include the ways that the intersection between race and place is informed by dynamics of environmental injustice and experienced differently by groups according to ethnic heritage and migrant status. Jenni enjoys travelling and playing disc golf with her husband and two teenage sons.

Andrea Saner
Associate Professor of Bible, Religion, and Theology
草莓社区

Theological interpretation of scripture began in the 1990s as a Christian movement within English-language theology and biblical studies, as scholars rallied around a shared critique of historical criticism. Recently, the battle lines have eased, and more theological interpreters include historical-critical approaches as preliminary aims toward the goals of theological interpretation. Drawing on her work in writing a commentary on Exodus, Andrea will introduce the lively scholarly debates surrounding the history of development of the Sinai traditions in Exodus and engage an ecumenical and interfaith conversation about the nature of divine revelation in light of these texts and their transmission histories.

Andrea D. Saner is associate professor of Old Testament and Hebrew Language. Author of 鈥�Too Much to Grasp鈥�: Exodus 3:13-15 and the Reality of God聽(Eisenbrauns, 2015), Andrea is currently writing the Exodus volume for the T&T Clark International Theological Commentary. Originally from Pennsylvania, Andrea came to EMU from northeast England, where she received a PhD in Old Testament from Durham University; she also holds a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. Andrea enjoys gardening, cycling, baking, and living in Harrisonburg with her husband and two young children.

Matthew Siderhurst
Professor of Chemistry
草莓社区

Tephritid fruit flies are among the most damaging horticultural pests worldwide, damaging fruits and vegetables through the tropics and subtropics.  Areawide pest management, in which neighboring farmers coordinate their control practices, has the potential to increase horticultural production and profits for small farmers in developing countries.  In this talk I鈥檒l be reflecting on my sabbatical work with a project focused on improving fruit fly control in mangoes funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research.  I鈥檒l discuss my research in Australia and Hawaii and how this relates to other parts of the project in Indonesia and the Philippines.

Dr. Matthew Siderhurst is a professor of chemistry at 草莓社区. He completed undergraduate studies at Goshen College and did his PhD work at Colorado State University before completing a postdoctoral fellowship with the USDA in Hilo, Hawaii. His research interests are diverse including recent projects on insect chemical ecology, coffee quality, spruce volatiles (odors), and insect tracking. Matt鈥檚 interests outside of chemistry and biology include Ultimate Frisbee, board games, science fiction, and foreign TV crime shows, with the pandemic threatening to make him into an ultrarunner.听

The declaration of a 鈥淲ar on Terror鈥� in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks brought sweeping changes to the American criminal justice and national security systems, as well as a massive shift in the American public opinion of both individual Muslims and the Islamic religion generally. Since that time, Muslim Americans have experienced higher levels of racism in their everyday lives. In this talk Dr. Selod shows how a Muslim identity has acquired racial meanings, through the hyper surveillance of Muslim Americans. Drawing on forty-eight in-depth interviews with South Asian and Arab Muslim Americans, Forever Suspect investigates how Muslim Americans are subjected to racialized surveillance in both an institutional context by the state and a social context by their neighbors and co-workers, resulting in Muslims participating in self surveillance. Dr. Selod highlights how this newly racialized religious identity, which is gendered, changes the social location of Arabs and South Asians on the racial hierarchy further away from whiteness and compromises their status as American citizens.

Saher Selod is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Simmons University. She joined the Department of Sociology in 2012 after completing her PhD at Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests are in race and ethnicity, gender, religion and surveillance. Her research examines how Muslim Americans experience racialization in the United States. Her book聽Forever Suspect: Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror聽(Rutgers University Press 2018) examines how Muslim men and Muslim women experience gendered forms of racialization through their surveillance by the state and by private citizens. She is currently writing a book on Global Islamophobia, which is under contract at Polity Press and is working on another project on policing, political participation and Muslims. Dr. Selod serves on the Editorial Boards of Ethnic and Racial Studies and Critical Sociology. She is a member of the聽聽and is a Faculty Affiliate for the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University.

Photographer Steven Johnson鈥檚 recent sabbatical offered him the opportunity to delve deeper into the oft-hidden lifecycles of the amphibians and macroinvertebrates found in the temporary ponds of our Appalachian forests. He developed a system for photographing minute copepods and daphnia in the field and witnessed a tiger salamander migration for the first time. Much of this work appears in a new e-book he developed for the North American Nature Photography Association titled Vernal Pools: Documenting Life in Temporary Ponds. In this talk, Steve will share natural history images from his sabbatical project and discuss the field documentation process.

Steven David Johnson is a conservation photographer and Professor of Visual and Communication Arts at EMU. His photography of the natural world has appeared in Orion, Nature Conservancy Magazine, Ranger Rick, Virginia Wildlife, National Science Teachers Association Press books and numerous conservation publications and journals. Steve is vice-president of the Virginia Wilderness Committee and an Affiliate of the International League of Conservation Photographers. When not in the office, you鈥檒l probably find him crouched next to a vernal pool photographing Appalachian salamanders.听

In the 1940s, six in ten Americans hadn鈥檛 gone past the eighth grade. Today a majority have attended college.  But surveys show that Americans today are no better educated about politics.  A majority don鈥檛 even know that we have three branches of government.  What鈥檚 gone wrong? The answer to the question would seem to be that we have a voter problem.  But Shenkman argues what we actually have is a human being problem.  In his talk he draws on research in history and science to explain why modern humans fail so often at tasks they should be good at (like deciding which politicians we can trust with power). He also asks why, despite obvious improvements in our democracy 鈥� such as the extension of voting rights to African Americans in 1965 鈥� the system seems to be so frustratingly unequal to the challenges we face.  He ends his talk on an optimistic note.  Science shows that for all their faults human beings share one gift that saves them time and again:  our adaptability to change and our willingness in the end to face reality.  

Rick Shenkman is the founder of George Washington University’s聽, a website that features leading historians’ perspectives on current events. He can regularly be seen on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. He is a New York Times best-selling author of seven history books; his latest book is聽Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics聽(Basic Books). Educated at Vassar and Harvard, Mr. Shenkman is an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter and the former managing editor of KIRO-TV, the CBS affiliate in Seattle. In 1997 he was the host, writer and producer of a prime time series for The Learning Channel inspired by his books on myths. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. He gives lectures at colleges around the country on several topics, including American myths and presidential politics.

Reading can save your life: living our lives in conversation with received narratives

In the Shelter can be understood, in a way, as an homage to reading: reading poetry, reading religious texts, reading the story of your own life. This colloquium will explore the practice of reading, and the question about normative narratives in personal and group belonging.

An ecotone is a landscape ecology term for the zone where two neighboring habitats interact. In his presentation, Kevin will explore how ecotones might help us think about the interactions between our readings of scripture and of literature. He will draw on his recent sabbatical-year experience teaching at the Oregon Extension, share a little about his forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press titled聽Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel: The Bible in English Fiction, 1678鈥�1767, and look ahead to his next writing project on ecology, scripture, and science fiction by discussing Octavia Butler’s聽Parable of the Sower.听

Dr. Kevin Seidel is an Associate Professor of English at 草莓社区. He teaches first-year college writing, a number of general education and humanities classes, and a wide range of literature, from ancient epics to contemporary poetry and science fiction. Originally from California, Kevin came to EMU from the University of Virginia, where he received his Ph.D. in English Literature and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Before that he earned a master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He teaches and writes about the changing relationship between religion, secularism, and literature. He is a long-time practitioner of Scriptural Reasoning, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims gather to read each other’s scripture. And his book tentatively titled Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel: The Bible in English Fiction, 1678鈥�1767 will be published by Cambridge University later this year.

Restorative Justice in Educational Settings: Beyond Circles and Conferences

Dr. Kathy Evans is an Associate Professor of Education at 草莓社区, teaching courses in educational psychology, special education, and restorative justice in education. She is the co-author of The Little Book of Restorative Justice in Education and has published articles and book chapters related to restorative justice and school discipline practices, focusing on the ways in which restorative justice is applied to educational contexts. With a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Research from The University of Tennessee in Knoxville, her teaching and scholarship focus on ways in which educators participate in creating more just and equitable educational opportunities for all students, including those with disability labels, those who exhibit challenging behavior, and those who are marginalized for a variety of reasons, including race, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, and gender identity.听

Restorative Justice: Signs and Symbols of Movement-Making

Carl Stauffer, PhD
Associate Professor, Center for Justice and Peacebuilding
草莓社区

Carl Stauffer, PhD, is Associate Professor of Justice at the Center for Justice & Peacebuilding at 草莓社区. He also serves as Co-Director of the Zehr Institute for RJ, and Academic Director of the Caux Scholars Program in Switzerland. Carl earned his PhD from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa. He has conducted RJ training and consultation in 37 countries on six continents. Carl鈥檚 research focuses on RJ as a social movement, and the use of indigenous and community justice practices as alternatives to mainstream transitional justice.